Shadow Priest Guide

Priests that choose the Shadow specialization sacrifice most of their healing abilities in exchange for increased damage. A shadow priest gains Shadowform, which makes you translucent, buffs your damage, and increases your armor. Shadow priests are a damage class that uses a combination of damage over time spells (DoTs) and direct damage spells. Shadow priests excel at multiple target and council fights.

Learn how to play this spec in Warlords of Draenor with our guide!

Crash Course Video

Blizzard has updated their level 90 videos for 6.0.2. This video covers the basics of a Shadow Priest.

What Draenor Brings to the Shadows? - Changes in Patch 6.0

Patch 6.0.2 brings a couple of key changes to Shadow Priests:

Mastery - Shadowy Recall - has been redone. Now it is Mastery: Mental Anguish, affecting Mind Blast, Mind Spike and Mind Flay, rather than DoT ones.

Solace and Insanity has been renamed, for Shadow, to Insanity, now causing Mind Flay to have its damage increased by 100%, everytime a Shadow Orbs is consumed, lasting 2 seconds per Shadow Orbs consumed.

Vampiric Embrace has been redone to be a better raid cooldown. Now it heals the priest and the raid for 10% (20% if glyphed) of the single-target damage done by the priest for its duration, no longer splitting the healing done.

Devouring Plague now ALWAYS costs 3 Shadow Orbs and it will heal the priest for 100% of the damage done, rather than per tick percentage basis heal.

Mind Quickening is now a passive effect, rather than caused by Shadowform and now increases haste and multistrike chance by 5%

The following spells have been removed:

Inner Fire

Inner Will

Void Shift

Hymn of Hope

Quality of Life changes:

Angelic Feather now prefers the casting priest than other targets, when casted on top of a group of players. Collecting multiple feathers now increase its duration to a maximum of 130% of the base duration(6 seconds).

Void Tendrils will now take the same damage as the rooted target and have 10% of the casting priest's health.

Mind Sear - Channeled AoE spell that spreads from the target it is cast on. Damages, if possible, both target and enemies around it. It will follow the target as it moves. Can be used on a friendly target for positioning requirements and won't damage him/her.

Mind Spike - A short cast, direct damage spell, it will remove your dots from the target it is cast on. Useful for targets that will not live long enough for a full dot duration.

Healing Spells

Shadow priests can cast some healing spells while in Shadowform, the rest cause you to lose Shadowform.

Leap of Faith - (often called life grip, after the Death Knight spell Death Grip) - An utility spell, not technically a heal, but very useful. Pulls a friendly target to you, good for saving someone from imminent death.

Cooldowns

Dispersion - 2 minutes cooldown, lasts 6 seconds. Reduces all damage taken by 90%. Can be used to avoid various death situations and receive grand amounts of necessary damage.

Vampiric Embrace - 3 minutes cooldown, lasts 15 seconds. Heals you and your party or raid for 10% of the single target damage you do while the effect is up (e.g. Mind Sear damage is not included) Can be a very effective heal if used properly.

Fade - 30 seconds cooldown. Reduces your threat for 10 seconds, making enemies prefer to attack different targets. Useful when you aggro enemies that you shouldn't and the tank needs to pick them up.

Utility

Mass Dispel - 15 seconds cooldown, 1.5 second cast. Area targeted dispel. Useful for situations that you are required to dispel yourself or a party/raid member.

Levitate - 10 minutes duration. Allows you to float off the ground, making you able to walk over water, and prevent falling damage. Can be cast on other players as well. Breaks on any damage taken.

Talents

The talent trees for Shadow priests either give you new abilities or modify existing ones in interesting ways. Many talents behave differently for shadow priests than healing specialization priests. For shadow there is no standard build for talents and you will find yourself wanting to change several talents depending on the type of fight or situation that you find yourself on. Especially the talents in tiers 3,5, and 6. In Warlords of Draenor, the new added tier - Level-100 - adds three new complete playstyles to the spec that will be covered in the next topic.

Angelic Bulwark - Passively gives you an absorption shield for equal to 15% of your health when you drop below 30% health.

Recommendation: Talent choice in this tier is up to individual preference. Usually it will end up between Desperate Prayer and Angelic Bulwark, with the exceptions of fights when Vanish can be used to skip some mechanic.

Recommendation: Angelic Feather will be usually your choice in this tier for PvE, unless you find yourself in need to provide your allies and yourself with speed increases AND shields, then Body and Soul will be your way to go. The snare removal of Phantasm is more useful for PvP, as there are few fights where a lot of snares and require removal by the player.

Recommendation: Usually Insanity provides the most damage. Depending on the number of targets in a fight, Surge of Darkness can give more damage, if managed properly, it is also useful for high movement fights. Mindbender is best used in situations where there are many targets and you won't have a chance to channel Mindbender or use all Surge of Darkness procs, because all your casts will be maintaining your DoTs up.

Tier 4 - Control

Required Level: 60

Void Tendrils - Roots up to 5 enemy targets within 8 yards for 20 seconds or until it is killed. The tendril will take the same damage as the target.

Psychic Scream - Causes up to 5 enemy targets within 8 yards of the priest to flee, disorienting them for 8 seconds. Damaging them may interrupt the effect. The targets won't move while under this effect.

Dominate Mind - Possess an enemy target, controling them for up to 30 (8 for PvP targets) seconds.

Recommendation: This tier is up to individual preference, Void Tendrils can be sometimes useful in raids, but not enough to have a large impact. Psychic Scream can be useful for crowd control purposes, but the duration is too short. Dominate Mind can be used as a crow control as well, but it is more PvP oriented.

Tier 5 - Damage

Required Level: 75

Twist of Fate - Grants you a passive that gives you a 15% damage increase whenever you damage a target that is below 35% health.

Power Infusion - Grants you a 2 minutes cooldown spell that gives you a 25% haste boost for 20 seconds. It also reduces all mana cost by 20%, but that shouldn't matter to you.

Recommendation: This tier is one of those that you will swap between talents quite frequently. Any fights that have a medium to large amount of adds dying over the fight, Twist of Fate will dominate over the other choices. Now, if you have situations that you have few to no adds to benefit from, or a council fight that all bosses share health with one another, Shadowy Insight is the way to go. Shadowy Insight is also recommended for fights where you need to move constantly. Power Infusion main function is to provide you with an extra cooldown for damage checks, like adds that need to die quickly. Another situation for Power Infusion is for when you have many targets with DoTs ticking at once and none of them are within Twist of Fate range.

Tier 6 - Area of Effect

Required Level: 90

Cascade - Launches a bolt that bounces from target to target (enemies only) splitting to 2 new bolts with each jump and damaging the targets. It can bounce up to 5 times, dealing more damage the further from eachother the targets are.

Divine Star - Fires a projectile in the direction you are currently facing that travels 24 yards and then returns, dealing damage to all targets within 4 yards of its path.

Halo - Launches a giant circle around you, that expands 30 yards, damaging every enemy it hits. Does the most damage at a distance of 25 yards, any distance further or closer than that will receive less damage, depending on the distance.

Recommendation: The talents in this tier are focused on what kind of AoE you need to use them on. If all enemies are stacked up and you can be, approximately, 25 yards from them, Halo is always the way to go. Now, if you need to stay stacked with the targets and can't move away from them, Divine Star should do the most damage to them. And finally, if the targets are all spread around the room, all different distances from you, Cascade will come in handy. For single-target purposes, Halo will usually be your choice.

Rotations for Level 100 Talents

With Warlords of Draenor, every class received a new talent row. The Shadow priest one, unlike other classes, adds more than just different spells or procs to use during fights, it changes completely how you should play in order to achieve the maximum amount of damage with each talent selection. It almost feels like Shadow has been given its own three different specs.

Void Entropy - It adds a new DoT to your arsenal, that requires 3 Shadow Orbs to be cast. The DoT lasts 1 minute and casting Devouring Plague on the target will refresh the duration to its full 1 minute duration.

Clarity of Power

Clarity of Power is your way to go if you seek to maximize your single-target output. The talent adds a lot of different possibilities to our spec due to its nature, below you can find two of the most popular uses of it.

It is a viable option for the talent, making Mastery a very good stat and a really good rotation for pure single-target fights with no movement. Just light movement already tune down the numbers for this rotation, making it not really good in a realistic scenario. The rotation also doesn't work nicely with some talents, like Insanity.

DoT Weaving

This variation of the talent provide you with the highest single-target damage, but any sort of movement in the wrong time will damage your output a whole lot. The priority list is set in two different moments: Build Up and Weaving. You stay on the Build Up phase until you reach 5 Shadow Orbs, then start the Weaving phase. You go back to Build Up once your current Devouring Plague is over and you can't cast it anymore. The best Tier 3 talent for this variation is Insanity.

Void Entropy

Void Entropy is the weakest of the talents in this tier, its intended use was for fights that you have multiple targets up at once and they take more than 40 seconds to die. But usually for this situation, Auspicious Spirits will be better or at least as good. The priority list for this talent is very similar to Clarity of Power's CoP Lite:

Glyphs

Major Glyphs

There are no damage increasing glyphs for shadow, only ones that increase our damage mitigation or provide mobility increases. The most commonly used are these:

Glyph of Vampiric Embrace - Increases the healing done by Vampiric Embrace to 20% of your single-target damage you do while it is active, reduces the duration by 5 seconds. Useful if taken proper advantage of.

Glyph of Delayed Coalescence - Causes your Dispersion to last 3 seconds longer, but the damage reduction starts decaying after 7 seconds. Useful when you need a damage taken mitigation for more than 6 seconds.

Glyph of Silence - Reduces the cooldown of your Silence by 25 seconds, but also reduces its duration. Useful for when you're on the interrupt duty and the original 45 seconds cooldown just won't cut it.

Minor Glyphs

There is only one minor glyph that actively affects DPS, and that is Glyph of the Sha, which aside from the appearance change of your shadow fiend, removes the global cooldown (GCD) from shadowfiend or mind bender, and is thus a slight DPS increase. The rest are fun cosmetic changes such Glyph of Shadow Ravens which changes your Shadow Orbs into birds or Glyph of Shadowy Friends extends Shadowform to your non-combat pets.

Stat Priorities and Enchanting

Basic stat priority

Warlords of Draenor removed the Hit and Expertise stats completly and made so that there are no more haste caps for DoT spells, by adding partial ticks.

Without giving the math behind it, the priority of the stats, for an average fight are:

Intellect

Spell Power

Critical Strike

Haste

Multistrike

Versatility

Mastery

Being Intellect the best stat, followed by Spell Power and so on.

Note: That priority is for an average situation, certain situations may have different priorities. The priorities for a single-target fight will be different than the priorities for a pure AoE fight, the list above ranks them based on an average situation.

Enchants

Professions

No profession bring direct combat benefits. The only benefit that you can get is with professions like Tailoring that will allow you to craft your own gear, or like Engineering that allow you to add cool and fun perks to use on your gear. That said, pick whichever profession you enjoy the most!

Comment by ominous88

Comment by higyster

Just like to know if you got tailoring and ench as your two pof would the back be more of a use as the back enchant or stick to the one posted here think of booting my Sp 67 allie human?

Comment by Sihirka

Hello, I notice that many high-level priests do not use the glyph of Sha, the abolition of the GCD always works ?

Comment by Aerynsun8449

I was just talking with one of the GMs about the guides (in general and shadow in particular) I was wondering if we could get an updated guide as some of the spell names have been changed, spells removed and talent levels rearrainged since this guide had been put out/last updated. I also had asked him about adding a link to report such changes when we see it, along with the link to report broken aspects of it as these aren't "broken" per se, just outdated information.One last thing I had asked him about is the possibility of getting video guides for each spect on each class. I am more of a visual learner than a book learner and I've actually changed what spec I play because I was better able to understand the basic mechanics in the videos than how to in the notes. After the basics, I play and modify to better fit my play style, but it would be helpful if there were basic guides for spec of each class. Thanks for all the great guides, this one and all the guides for each class. They're great as I play one of each class, invaluable for me. Again, thanks.

Comment by movez

I have a big question most people are probably wondering. It seems like in raids we will be changing from Auspicious Spirits to CoP. Are both of these talents using the same stat priority because it seems like CoP would use Mastery while the other would use Crit. My guess is we will probably have to use two different sets for this. I haven't been able to test these things out so maybe someone can help me out.

Comment by AliasWit

"Build up phase"?

I may be missing something, but why wouldn't you want to slap your agony AND Vamp DoT on before the Mind Blast/Mind Spike build-up?

Comment by Carukia

I disagree with your Clarity of Power level 100 rotations. Your "Expected CoP" rotation only uses the Mind Blast cooldown reduction, something you criticize your "CoP Lite" rotation for doing. Your "DoT Weaving" rotation doesn't fare much better. I don't think Blizz expects you to only use half the talent. Instead, I think CoP is intended to be a highly mobile spec with good single target damage.

Pair CoP with Surge of Darkness from level 45 and Shadowy Insight from level 75. Surge of Darkness gives you instant Mind Spikes that don't touch your DoTs but benefits from having them up due to CoP. Shadowy Insight gives you more Mind Blasts after using those Mind Spikes. And those Mind Blasts, paired with the extra Mind Blasts from CoP, gives you tons of Shadow Orbs. Those Shadow Orbs then allow you to cast Devouring Plague more often which feeds Surge of Darkness.

The only non-instants you would ever cast are Vampiric Touch and the occasional Mind Flay if you are unlucky with procs.

Comment by Stiverton

After reading over your level 100 section, I think that it's a good start, but my gut feeling is that it's not 100% accurate, especially in regards to the situation you say that each talent is supposed to perform best in. I need to do more experimenting to be able to come up with a compelling alternative opinion first though.

Another thing is that I think that if there are talents that are significantly weaker or stronger than the others, Blizzard will probably adjust them so they are more in line with each other.

I think that Void Entropy is intended to be your non-movement, single target, raid boss DPS spell. I think that auspicious spirits is intended to be a multi target DPS spec. I think that CoP is intended to be for PvP and farming equal or lesser level mobs.

Oh and the last thing, and this I am pretty confident on: DP is only higher priority than Mind Blast and SWD if you are at 5 Orbs. Anything less than 5 orbs and you hit Mind Blast/SWD first, otherwise you are lowering your orb generation.

Comment by Taarven

The definition you have for Clarity of Power is incorrect, or the tooltip in game is. It states in game that it is a 40% increace of damage for contacts NOT affected with SWP or VT.

Comment by Aibolit666

Mere dwarf is not the race to represent shadow priests. Undead is the perfect race to combine darkness and light under one shell.

Comment by raymix

I just want to add that Insanity talent is actually viable with CoP rotation if you do Mind Flay right after Devouring Plague instead of Mind Spike, this lets you both: Keep DP dot and benefit from increased damage on MF.

Thank you for the guide.

Comment by sgtrama

As a long-time shadow priest I'm having hard time understanding what I bring to a group in WoD. I've tried DoT weaving and AS. I see a, somewhat minor, increase in DPS with DoT weaving, but I'm still consistently and substantially below other classes in groups of similar item level (~630). In MoP I would get regularly out DPS'd but it still felt competitive compared to what I'm doing now. At least then I saw more heals from VE and could void shift. Right now I don't have any CC, my damage, both single target and AOE, are sub pay, and I can't figure out what utility I bring that someone else can't do better. Should I expect to see better increases in DPS and passive heals when I have better stats?

Comment by Raf4

THANK YOU for this very helpful guide to the best class in WoW. Nicely done!